For particularly bad problems, after exhausting standard methods, I start writing a stackoverflow question or a help request to someone on my team. I barely ever have to send it, this just forces me to spell out an exhaustive list of things that I've tried (or forgot to try). Eventually I figure out what I've missed, and if not, I have a help request all ready to go!
That's awesome - just today I was trying to hand off an "investigate failure X..." bug, and in the process of fleshing out the email, it transformed itself into a "method X should handle exception Y from method Z" bug.